It is about the wonderful environment of the Peterson Building, home of the d.school, how it came to look the way it does, with its customized fittings, studios, prototyping facilities, spaces to meet and create. Scott and Scott were key figures in its design and offer, with the help of other d.schoolers, a menu of ideas about how to make creative spaces.

Flexible spaces that can be configured to the different stages in the design process.

The d.school’s enlightened White Room, Booth blanc, where you can write ideas on all the surfaces

I am particularly interested in just how environment affects what we think and do. My class on urban planning [Link] uses the design of ancient cities to define the human qualities at the heart of sustainable urban life – the way architecture interacts with creative urban experience.

Stanford Strategy Studio involved a series of experiments in staging conversations about matters of common and pressing human concern [Link]. We realized the power of saturated environments, places that resonate through rich ambience, staging, artifacts, media.

Crucial also is persistence – how certain spaces, with their artifacts, can maintain conversation, engagement with a task, shared experiences and findings, over time, by offering mnemonics

- rooms with memory

Our Revs Program is considering, under its aim of promoting a broad human-centered appreciation of automotive engineering and culture over the last 150 years, the way a museum can be a design space – offering artifacts and archives that inspire through their arrangement in a museological space,

artifacts reminding us, through their materiality, of where we have been, and hopes and prospects of realizing our projects to design a better world.

In the d.school the standard rule is to “reset” a studio after using it – tidy up, put the furniture and fittings back in storage, clean white boards, tidy up tools and materials. Wipe the space clean and erase the traces of what has been happening there. It means that most of the d.school, most of the time, looks remarkably clean, minimalist, and somewhat sterile – only ready-to-be-used.

From the studio of artist Terry Winters

I think that memory, history, the archaeology of a place, the embodiment of experience and event in a place, a building, a landscape, a studio is immensely important to creativity. Every artist’s studio I have encountered is saturated in such memory.

But we can drown in the past.

This is actually the manifestation of a classic conundrum of

an archaeological sensibility

- how much to conserve, how much to discard

Metamedia – my lab at Stanford – 2006/2007 – a saturated space here as an authoring studio, then
used for modeling conversations, now becoming again a studio space for the Revs Program.

Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces,

that presence is filled with the past,

that the future is not constructed with innovation per se, but is an ongoing project of working on what is left of the past, and on what will become the past

(those iterative acts at the heart of design thinking).

Bamburgh Hall, Northumberland UK, a village that was once the capital heart of Celtic Christianity, setting for Walter Besant’s historical novel of 1884 Dorothy Forster, set in the Jacobin uprising of 1715

This is something of an antithesis to historiography, that the writing of history establishes events, sequence, date, agency, causation. Instead Laurent celebrates Walter Benjamin’s attack on such historicism with his messianic time of the now – Jetztzeit, and takes up Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of duration.

There are four key components to this argument.

1) The temporality of archaeology, our most intimate human experience of the past, is not date and event, but what I term actuality – conjuncture, the articulation of past and present, rooted in the way the past can endure, albeit changed. Actulaity is the Greek kairos – a moment of re-connection, re-collection, when something prompts a link between past and present (hence Laurent sees this as memory practice).

2) There is in this articulation a melancholic paradox – the past’s material decay is the condition of its persistence. The past is gone, and, though we may wish to revisit, we can do so only on the basis of remains that must have changed. Forever now beyond experience, we can only know the past because it has changed, has become trace and vestige, and is thus with us now.

The present must decay. Immortality is not an option. Transiency is our condition of being, of the existence of the past in the present. Ruin and decay mean that the past can be a potential subject of experience and knowledge. Things can endure, through their material resistance to decay and ruin, and because we can care and protect, attend to old things.

3) This is a geneaological perspective, focused on chains of connection reaching back into time immemorial. Its main features are not plot and event (the drama of historicism), but everyday matters, the quotidian, material textures of life. Most of the past in the present is trivial and superficial.

I think of the fictions of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, indeed those too of Walter Scott, and how they foreground texture and indeterminacy. Consider how photography is a superb witness of precisely the superficial and everyday, mostly irrelevant noise against which we may wish to see event and drama in the gap between the moment of picture taking and viewing – the actuality of the photograph, the temporal gulf bridged by its materiality.

4) The past needs work, the present contains latent pasts ready to be re-activitaed, re-collected, re-articulated, re-presented in creative work – the craft of archaeology. In this geneaological perspective there are necessary breaks with the past, because memory depends upon forgetting. Memory does not hold onto the currency of the ongoing present, but is conjuncture – when something prompts a connection to be made with what had until then been forgotten, latent or dormant. The past returns in such creative acts, such hauntings that may appear quite uncanny, precisley because of the breaks in the flow of time.

See my book Experiencing the Past (1992) [Link]
The Archaeological Imagination (2012) [Link]
Archive 3.0 [Link]
Archaeography.com [Link]
Archaeographer.com [Link]
Ruin Memories [Link]

Daguerreotype, c 1850

On a visit to Walter Scott’s grave in the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey.

Some extraordinary gravestones. Late 18th century.

I have been talking with Bianca (Carpeneti) and Chris (Lowman) about a true education of the sentiments – as envisaged by Rousseau – so much more appropriately contemporary than Flaubert – cutting through disciplines, disciplinary slicing through to the human …

Is this not the embodiment?

Reading as redemption. Books that speak to everything – and the thought that we are all in search of maybe five that live and die with us, our very own texts. I think of Borges’ infinite texts, but these would be utterly specific to ourselves, infinite not in their comprehensiveness, but in the way they speak to a single soul.

Another artist exploring an archaeological sensibility – Rotterdam based Lara Almarcegui.

Secession – at TENT, Rotterdam.

Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is a large-scale installation called Waste Not. It comprises over 10,000 items ranging from pots and basins to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes, and stuffed animals collected by the artist’s mother over the course of more than five decades.

Haunting, everyday textures

David Petts has posted an x-ray made by Jenny Jones of one of the artifacts found this summer – [Link]

It didn’t look like much when it was found. It turns out to be a stylus – for writing on wax tablets.

Evidence for literacy in the last days of empire. A personal item, likely as not. To convey the mark of the writer. Another of those silent witnesses in our contemporary archaeological sensibility, attuned to traces and vestiges, memory fragments asking for reconstitution.

I find this kind of thing so evocative.

Wonderful comment this morning from Victoria Bellotti (PARC) – that archaeology is dethnography

Absolutely – (d)ethnography – d.ethnography – the intermingling of dreams and mortality, utopia and the realities of material constraints, the angel of death whispering in the ear of aspiration. What is more human?

Death at the heart of living; negative entropy as a life force. Very Gothic. Very Heidegger. Very Benjamin.

And a great excuse to post another example of haunted media! (Ethnographers in industry like to show lots of photographs of their subjects – but should beware of the politics of the fetishistic gaze )

Daguerreotype. c1850. Digitally restored. [Link]

Kenya Hara, Art Director of Muji, has opened the conference with a beautiful meditation on emptiness – “ku”.

For me, Kenya was talking about human being and how it implicates the world of things.

This Henckels knife fits the hand of the cook beautifully. It is designed that way, ergonomically.

In contrast, the Yanagiba knife fits not so much the hand of the cook as their skill.

As Kenya put it

A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb).

[Link]

This simplicity is all about leaving a gap, precisely within the relationship between cook and knife, where the cook can be who they are. Just as typography, legibility, is about relationships between the figure and the white space, so too these gaps, voids, empty spaces are the condition of human identity. A figure stands out only against a background; a signal implies background noise, formless, empty.

Ku

Our Cartesian inheritance often has us forget this relational character of people and their things, as we focus upon fullness of being, substantive characteristics and attributes. Yet fullness only makes sense in terms of a fundamental, an ontological emptiness of things.

I found these notes of mine, grabbed from somewhere on the web – part of an ongoing project concerned with figure-ground relationships – [Link] [Link]

Just as “mu” (nothingness) is beyond existence and non-existence, we must be careful not to think that “ku” (emptiness) is a description of a condition where something that should exist does not …

It is the emptiness of emptiness, it is the emptiness of the circumstances of any situation, and it is the emptiness of yourself. “Ku” translates the Sanskrit “sunyata” meaning emptiness, void, fundamental insubstantiality. It refers to existence without enduring substance. Though all phenomenal things exist, they are empty of any enduring or inherent “self.” In other words, all the existences in the cosmos exist, but their essence cannot be apprehended because it is emptiness. This emptiness is the ultimate reality underlying all existences. Thus “Ku” in Buddhism is the Invisible, a concept of God. When Bodhidharma, the first patriarch of Zen in China, was asked by Emperor Wu (502-549 CE) about what was the ultimate and holiest principle of Buddhism, he replied, “Vast emptiness [ku], and nothing holy in it.”

Whether or not this is accurate on Buddhism, I certainly hold to this kind of relational thinking. It is not just that context is essential to understanding someone or something; those connections between people and things make them what they are.

I think of this emptiness in the following way. This conference is about the importance of ethnographic research in understanding how people live with things, so that we might design the world in a better way. As an archaeological ethnographer I interrogate the remains of human (and non-human) lives. I might ask – “Just what was going on?” And I may be able to substantiate my answers through an array of information and argument “They were up to this and that”. But however strong my argument, there is one consistent and simple answer to the question – “Nothing in particular was going on”. No one thing in particular.

It is not just that our understanding of the world depends upon the questions we ask. Nor is it that the world is multi-faceted. It is what Kenya maintains – emptiness actually makes things (and people) what they are. Put a different way, most of reality is background noise where nothing in particular is happening – that wonderful and creative richness that prompts our questions and efforts to form and forge meaning.

“I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”

Manhattan

(see also archaeography.com)

Steam-powered computer mice, clockwork hearts, brass goggles, and the latest state-of-the-art eye-pod?

Enter “steampunk”. Subject of an exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, UK.

My daughter Molly is familiar with all this – “The Subtle Knife” was one of her favorite novels.

Think too of Jules Verne, and the way he imagined the future.

Counterfactuals combined with the futurology of earlier times. Retro futures. Anachronistic utopias. When archaeological materialities meet science fiction.

Here is the museum’s introduction to the fabulous exhibition of contemporary art.

Exhibition blog – [Link]

I mentioned in a recent post about design and the everyday the little photobook “thoughtless acts” by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO – [Link]

It is a collection of observations, documented in snapshot photos, of intuitive ways that people adapt, exploit and react to things, creatively, without really thinking. Tacit acts.

A collection - of course, designers don’t just come up with artifacts. The research that is often at the heart of design, certainly human-centered design such as that practiced by IDEO, involves collecting and analyzing and interpreting observations – about people, what they do, what works and what doesn’t work for people.

At IDEO some of this research is embodied in a fascinating collection of “designerly things” – interesting materials (squishy, hard, metals with a memory, temperature sensitive …), cool hinges, neat handles … . They’ve been collected from all over by IDEO people and are carefully curated in carts around IDEO offices, recorded in a database so that you can search for particular qualities, particular solutions to design problems.

Bill Moggridge with the IDEO collection

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was set up as a design museum that would inform good industrial design, through encounter with its collections of things from across the world and through the ages.

Another connection between design and archaeology.

Don’t you often wonder about what museums keep in their store rooms, but rarely manage to display? The hidden, perhaps forgotten, treasures of “The Archive”

Last year, between March 2007 and April 2008, in a small gallery off the main stair well in our Cantor Arts Center at Stanford stood a locked steel cage full of art works … still in their protective storage boxes, half-opened to let you peek in.

a project in “animating the archive” – Archive 3.0

The artifacts were the main part of a collection I made from the store rooms of the Cantor — 52 artifacts, one for each week of the year, randomly selected from the museum’s vast database.

By the cage was a computer and an invitation to make a comment on the exhibition’s web site. To say something about what you could see in the cage, what you might imagine about the store rooms, what treasures lay down there, cared for, but unseen.

I had been asked by the Cantor to be part of their “Faculty Choice” program — to deliver a reaction to the collections, as a member of Stanford’s faculty. Others have given tours of the galleries or presented lectures on their interests in the rather marvelous holdings. I asked to be let into the basement, through the locked door into the store rooms, to see what lay within. I couldn’t expect to see everything, so I developed a simple way of making a random sample of the museum’s collection – random numbers taken from the radioactive decay of Caesium 137 applied to the museum’s digital data base. (OK this may sound wacky – but have a look here at my thinking [Link])

I wanted to share my fascination with museum store rooms. I love the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. I had spent many months exploring the depths of collections of Greek pottery across Europe and the Mediterranean in my 10 year study of ancient Corinthian perfume jars [Link]) So I built a web site, a wiki, that would let anyone view the artifacts dredged from the store rooms, alongside available information about them, and then add comment or reaction. I worked with a team of high school and college students who did just this and presented their own personal collection of art works, together with stories and researches.

This had worked well for an exhibition of the photography of Edward Burtynsky held in 2005. The accompanying wiki attracted over 70,000 interactions and delivered some very interesting discussions – [Link]

I planned a series of additions to the exhibition with the high school students — images and clippings in a collage on the gallery wall, and perhaps some more artifacts, everyday items, placed alongside the cage.

But the project stalled. After the first contributions from the students I let the web site rest. I have hesitated to share the reasons, but there are some very interesting dilemmas at the core of my experience.

What is to be done with collections in museums of artifacts about which we know very little?

Though the Cantor Art Center has developed a focus upon the arts over the last ten years and more, since the museum was redesigned after the ’89 earthquake, its storerooms are still dominated by the original Stanford Family collections and a cascade of donations made since. Jane and Leland junior were quite eclectic and even promiscuous in their buying. Other donations are very mixed in their character and quality. Most are not the kind of thing you would put in a conventional gallery exhibition.

My encounter with these collections in the store rooms was based upon an exploration of the database, though it was far more fascinating to simply open drawers at random to see what was within. The Cantor is a well-resourced and well-run establishment. Its storerooms are state of the art in their organization and protection offered to the artifacts.

Nevertheless, of the 52 artifacts chosen at random from the database, 5 were found to be missing. And none had any significant detailed information concerning where they came from. There were some beautiful items, and some quite strange. The old pistol in the cigar box was rather evocative. But all the information about the artifacts was circumstantial and incidental, usually concerning the donor.

I had anticipated this. The project was designed to evoke and provoke. The involvement of the students and the accompanying web site were designed to add context, of whatever kind, to the artifacts.

Here is how I put it:

Animating the archive

Archives – the collections at the heart of our experience of history – need to be brought alive. As well as looking after the remains of the past for the future, we might make something of the past in the present.

Opening up the importance of context

A crucial issue is context . Artifacts become tautologies if we don’t know where they came from, the circumstances of their making, use, exchange and discard, who cared for them, what became of them, their life history. Tautology – because we only confirm what we already know when we assign an artifact to a class simply on the basis of what its form tells us and through reference of form and attributes to a standard catalogue or art history. This Corinthian perfume jar is … a Corinthian perfume jar! Albeit a beautiful/ugly/different/regular one.

Connecting collection with storytelling

Collections and archives come to life when we tell stories about them. When we connect things to contexts in this way.

Revealing value

This project asks questions about the character of collection. Why do some things fascinate? What values lie behind collection?

Things are collected when they are seen to have some value. The art museum is often interested in aesthetic value, how an artifact is a testament to an artist’s skills, and to the taste of the collector in acquiring such a fine example.

How interesting is this? There are many different kinds of value – ways of finding interest in an artifact because of how it speaks to you, of its qualities and experiences, how these connect with your own.

This project encourages us to explore different kinds of value through the members of a collection.

Revealing the personal

Value always also has a personal dimension. It is how ”’you”’ connect with a thing, how ”’you”’ find it of value.

This project is about exploring such personal responses.

Richer accounts – challenging the standard stories

Much collection and exhibition starts and ends with familiar stories. The history of art; the story of an artist; the variety of a type of valued artifact; the history of a region.

This project begins with a random selection from items in store, not with a story or contribution to art history, nor with some intrinsic quality, though all of these may have originally led to an item joining the museum.

The project sets us the task of finding connections and weaving stories. Its emphasis is upon the process of building a collection.

This is quite a different basis to exhibition. We expect to generate richer experiences and stories.

Redeming the past

Think of all this as a kind of rescue or salvage archaeology, an animation of the cultural archive that is a museum, a redemption of the loss inherent in the ruin that is history, making good the gaps, the missing pieces.

So what went wrong?

Nothing really. Except that the responses revealed the inherent poverty of collections like this Or, more precisely, the complexity, the contradictions at the heart of notions of cultural value. The students struggled, quite appropriately, to reconcile the expectation that they would learn from the artifacts (about the ancient past, Asian arts, archaeology) with the reality that the collection only came to life when connected with quite subjective aspects of their own experience that actually said nothing much at all about the artifacts (the students produced some fascinating micro-narratives of their lives, hopes, interests).

Paradox – the poverty of such collections in terms of historical and archaeological value is only revealed through the attention and engagement of “collectors” – those fascinated with archives and museums. This runs deep into the values contested in the market for ancient art and antiquities. Collectors love the things for their qualities; for art historians and archaeologists and those of like mind, the things are located in much broader and richer contexts.

So the web site was showing conspicuously that the collection of a great and well-run museum such as that at Stanford is actually not all that rich as a resource for learning.

Perhaps this is not such a bad thing?

Tom Seligman, Director of the Cantor Arts Center, has pioneered the radical evolution from “museum” to “arts center”, emphasizing active and very explicit development of the university’s holdings of art, very conscious of these issues of value. This issue of the pedagogical and cultural value of collections needs airing. A university collection is a good place to start.

I do think also that people need to know about a connected scandal, little known to most. Well-organized and well-managed collections, such as that at Stanford, are the exception. I have seen vast collections of fabulous works lying rotting and undocumented in so many museum store rooms across the world.

More information – [Link]

Gallery – [Link]

On museum futures – [Link]

I am still reading today’s Arts section of the Guardian – this time Adrian Searle’s preview of the Tate Modern’s new exhibition of Joseph Beuys [Link]

Beuys wasn’t being mischievous or disingenuous when he said there was nothing to understand (in his work). He may have been wrong to believe everyone could be an artist, but everyone can be a spectator. The mind wanders; connections come to us if we let them, and if we work at them, if we engage. But engagement comes at a price. The whole of his art is about coming to grips with something unmanageable. He once opened a talk with the following: “Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, I should like to start with the wound.” And what wound might that be, Herr Beuys? The lecture was titled: “Talking about one’s country: Germany.”

Beuys and the history of 20th-century Germany are inextricable. One of his best-known works here, The End of the 20th Century, is a gallery filled with large, roughly hewn basalt stones, each about the size of a man. They lie strewn about, like so many bodies. Some attempt at order and alignment has been made, but it is kind of half-hearted. Some stones have fallen on to others, and have been left where they fell. Each stone has had a cone dug out of it, the missing part reinserted, the gaps plugged with felt and clay. An attempt at reanimation, then; a botched job, for all the effort.

It might be tempting to see Beuys as something of a Renaissance man: Beuys the utopian, Beuys the dandy, Beuys the self-mythologist, the performer, the spell-binding teacher, the green politician; Beuys the Hitler youth, the twice-wounded Luftwaffe volunteer, with two Iron Crosses to his name; Beuys the great German artist. His artistic and intellectual development was born out of disaster, and Beuys himself was deeply complicated, as well as implicated, like millions of other German servicemen and women of his generation (Beuys was born in 1921). He was open about his past, even if he mythologised it, often in darkly humorous ways, and unbelievable ways. His art, his intellectual and political stance and his serious depression in the mid-1950s are all evidence of how he came to terms with personal as well as national guilt.

How else to see the muck and the detritus and the filth-rimed tins, the bones and the agglomerations of unnamable objects in certain of Beuy’s vitrines, which are arranged in angled rows and little groups in one large room? There are things here like amputated limbs, bound in string; clods of earth and roots that, much as they might lead us to think of Albrecht Durer’s clumps of grass, might also make us think of blown-up German soil. Here is congealed hare’s blood, rancid batteries, lumps of fat, a cloth apron-pocket of hardened wax and tallow that sags like some wretched udder, iron and sulphur and razor blades, a little model house with missing walls and stairs leading nowhere, fat-spattered cardboard boxes, a bit of hardened blood-sausage like a lump of old shit. Everything here – the sutures, the coffee spoons, the crate of old beer bottles – is arranged with consummate care in these negative still-lives. Like the poetry of Paul Celan, this is what art comes to after Auschwitz.

A fabulous depiction of the archaeological. In all its political ramifications.

Liquid prompts guide our steps towards the scintillae of the supremely visible Thames.

Here begins the work of poets and painters, their argument and co-dependence; treacherous depths, imported narratives, shows of light. Here begins the difficulty with representing a force that resists representation. Here begins the substance out of which London’s dreaming is made. The Thames floods, ebbs: a seductive surface, active, dirty, copywritten by Eliot, Pope, Spenser, Conrad, Celine.

When I worked, in the 1970s, as a gardener in Limehouse, I used to see the grey spectre, an X-ray with its own microclimate, of Francis Bacon. At the bus stop. Belted aluminium raincoat, hands in pockets. Solitary. He had a house in Narrow Street, convenient for social interaction, pub life, redundant dockers, but useless as a studio. He couldn’t, he had no ambitions in that direction, paint the river. He kept the blinds down, promiscuous light was excluded. He couldn’t paint at all; the shifts, the sounds, were overwhelming. He commuted to Kensington. The studio, in a noble tradition, was a down-river bolthole: off-limits, taking advantage of present malaise and a recoverable tradition of submersion and erasure.

Turner inherited property in Wapping, which included a pub, the Ship and Bladebone. He devoured river light and relished the potential profits that would accrue from Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Rotherhithe Tunnel. He enjoyed sexual favours hidden from the pinch of polite society. The Thames at Wapping reflected low skies, migrating weather systems. Turner worked, as always, inside and out, filling his sketchbooks: the heat of women’s bodies, muscle and fold, twinned with meaty sunsets. A poker-red eye burning off the murk, the sullen damp. Locals knew the short, peppery gentleman as “Admiral Booth”. He was often out on the river.

London air was foul, soot coating the lungs, but attractive to painters: a thick membrane penetrated by prismatic shafts. Turner was a walker. Like old Betty Higden in Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend , he could manage 20 miles a day, if put to it. Even his ageing father, caretaker of the Twicken ham property, would trudge 11 miles, in and out of London, to open Turner’s gallery. Painters shadow the river, struggling to fix the unfixable; trying to nail a fistful of mercury to a wet wall.

“I adore London,” Monet said, “but what I love more than anything is the fog.” Industrial pollution, sea coal fires, river fret: every element contributes to the London Particular. Light so thick you can taste it. Monet, a refugee from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, factored strategic tourism into vision: unscripted postcard views dissolving sky into river.

Sinclair is a favorite writer of mine. I drew on him for the piece Three Rooms- an experiment in writing about architecture, remains and the performance of everyday life.

Archaeologies of the contemporary past.

Laurent Olivier’s great notion – [Link]

Tomorrow I am going to be talking about the temporal percolations that are our experience of archaeological time, and given promiscuous life in the urban imaginary. It is for the “Seeing the Past”? conference here at Stanford.

Sinclair’s writing deals in the lapidary images and anecdotes that make the urban imaginary. So archaeological in its layering, cross references, deep mapping.

Mark Dion’s Thames Dig also comes to mind.

Monet’s Thames

[Link - Turner Whistler Monet Exhibiiton at the Tate in London]

I am trying to capture this experience of cities in the chapter on urbanization in my new book “Origins”.

I never got to finish my comment on Derrida who died last week. [BBC Link]

The obituaries were largely stifled by misunderstanding, outrage, horror and incredulity – have a look at the Guradian’s lamentable list – [Link]

Mark Taylor was better in the NYT – [Link]

Jacques Derrida

Flying back to the US today I see that Time Magazine (issue Dec 27 – Jan 3) includes Derrida in its review of the year.

But he does not appear in the on-line issue. Embarrassment? Whatever.

I want to point out how profoundly archaeological is Derrida’s thinking.

Begin with a key point about our (archaeological) understanding of the past – that it has been crippled by a series of radical oppositions in our thinking, our research, values and understanding, and where one pole is privileged over the other

Presence/absence, materiality/inscription, past/present, those we are interested in/our attempts to understand, what happened/what is left over, life/death, fullness of cultural experience/loss and repetition.

We are meant to think of how absurd it would be to challenge these distinctions – that somehow the traces of the past could hold something the past itself did not possess – that we might suspect the past did not actually happen the way it did, that the past is not internal to itself, but somehow extends beyond its present, genealogically, into its past and into its subsequent history,

But this is just what Derrida does – puts to one side these privileged terms and treats the pairs symmetrically.

With good reason.

For archaeology, and archaeology is the material cornerstone of history and our sense of history, the past is, of course, here with us, living again as we make it our own. And who, arrogantly, will dare to claim they know what really is happening, now or back then? Who will lay claim to the time machine that will reveal the secrets of the past?

We know that all we actually do have are traces, that we only work on flimsy remains, betwen past and present.

Derrida worked on ways of dealing in this undecidability.

The archaeology of zombies.

And this is the first key term – undecidability. Uncertain spaces between. Short circuits. Zombies, vampires – alive AND dead; neither dead nor alive. Secrets we must refuse to believe, even if they are true. Undecidables threaten because they poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. Undecidability – the horror of indeterminacy. The failure of the life/death presemce/absence opposition. And what threatens and transgresses its category fascinates us.

Tactic – don’t decide. Play both sides. Dis-place past and present, original and trace.

The trace – an undecidable, the past displaced into what remains, both present and absent. The undecidable trace is the origin of the meaning of the past – both present to us, but lost too.

Think too of authentic and original against counterfeit, fake. The signature or seal, representing one’s authentic presence and identity, has to be repeatable, iterable. Like the past. It has to be repeated. Otherwise it wouldn’t be recognisable. Faking it is a necessary part of authenticity. And we are fascinated by forgery.

The past keeps returning, but different, in the new associations of the traces and remains, our hindsight. This is the necessary iteration of the past – it will never be pinned down, there is no bottom line on what happened in the past, because the remains are a return of the past, the same but different (this is the distinction between repetition and iteration).

Ironically perhaps the past is constantly deferred into the future – we will never know, though we may work upon the remains. Deferment.

Strategy. Don’t explain the past – unfix it.

I see an essential honesty and humility in all this, and one that is in sharp contrast to those grand designs of so many of my colleagues to organize and control the evidence, to supposedly get to the truth, to find out what supposedly really happened – which is actually only what they want you to think because it suits them to have it so.

This is all at the heart of what we are calling a symmetrical archaeology.

Media stars all over the walls – agents’ photos. A curious genre.

David Suchet – Hercule Poirot

Black and white, mannerist, smiley faces.

They say “we had dinner here and gave the restaurant our photo”.

But also these photos make me think of claims like “Henry VIII slept in this bed”.

Or, the photos, witnessing a dinner taken by someone in this very room where I too now eat, create a similar effect to the knowledge that something happened here – “a murder occured in this room”.

So these photos are another sort of archaeological media trace.

An example of located media too – a specific association of medium, place and event.

We eat at the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco. Like La Barca, it is around the corner from theatres and concert halls and sports on its walls lots of agents’ photos of minor celebrities.

Alan and I were talking about the routes we have followed in the last twenty years from the North East of England to where we are now, Stanford and Westminster, and reflecting on Arnie in California and successors to Tony Blair in the UK.

Site specifics – it could hardly have been the same conversation in San Francisco, even if the words were the same.

I regularly post about the horror that lies just beneath the surface of things, everyday normality rooted in the uncanny secret lives of things – have a look at Horror and disclosure – a scene of crime clings to its past

Joe (Adler) has just sent me word of Die Familie Schneider – An Art House Of Fear In Whitechapel. I do I wish I could see this!

The work is by Gregor Schneider and commissioned by Artangel.

Two apparently normal houses side by side.

Here is Camelia Gupta’s superb review on 24hourmuseum.org

I let myself in, wondering who I am to be letting myself into someone else’s house.

Shutting the door, I’m thus already a little nervous. The narrow corridors are claustrophobic. I hesitate in the doorway but my awareness that I only have 20 minutes to see both houses (one of several conditions of viewing) forces me on.

In the second house, I feel slightly braver. I wondered in the first house whether I was allowed to interact with the inhabitants of the houses but felt too oppressed. In an embarrassingly quavery and hesitant voice, I hail the woman in the kitchen. She ignores me. I’m not sure whether I want her to respond, as that would indicate that I belong in this world.

A world where violence seems to lurk at every edge. There’s the terrifying sexual graffiti in the attic, visible only through the keyhole of locked door with, most worryingly, a locked child-gate placed in front of it. Was a child kept here? Does this connect to the secret passage and its grim destination? On the other hand, being ignored has the effect of making me feel like a ghost, condemned to witness and absorb the horror but with no scope for action. Neither option appeals.

And in another related review -

There’s a woman in kitchen washing dishes endlessly, in a way that is reminiscent both of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and of Lady Macbeth’s “out damned spot”.

The 70s aesthetic of the bedroom is deeply unpleasant. The heat is suffocating, the carpet muffles my footsteps. I realise suddenly that there’s a body in a bag in the far corner. I feel faint for a second. It appears to be wearing a uniform and is small: child-sized.

Bathroom. A man masturbates in the shower, back turned and partially visible through curtains. I don’t know how to behave – and hover, while his pants and groans fill the small room. Needing distraction, I rummage through cupboards.

I’m glad that I have to write, I’m using it to anchor and ground myself, to remind myself that there’s a world beyond this one. I badly need the reminder right now. It’s hard to battle the sense that this awful space is all there is.

Deep breath, and onto the second house. Scared of what I’ll find. Another condition is that once you’ve left one house, you may not return to it.

On my god. It’s the same. But I’m different looking at it. I feel the need to look closely at the woman in the kitchen. As I say, I feel moved/able to speak to her. She’s exactly like the first one. (They’re twins.) In the bathroom, I’m moved to examine the wanking man to get closer. He seems louder than the first, but I cannot compare. Perhaps my mounting panic is heightening my senses?

I can’t know whether it’s the same, as I’m not allowed to go back and check.

Downstairs is also the same, and now I?m finding this sameness terrifying. What the hell is happening here? The repetition has varying effects; the carpeted room feels even more like a cell. I can hear nothing but my own, heavy, breathing. I’m scared – in the cellar, I’m reluctant to shut the door.

An archaeological sensibility holds that we only ever have fragments to work upon, that every locale is a potential scene of crime where anything could be evidence, that there remains to much to be discovered beneath the surface of things, and much that we will not like, because the stories we have been told are meant to console and quieten us …

The BBC is reporting what looks like another publicity scam

Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that’s made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding?

Could an obscure inscription on a 250-year-old monument in a Staffordshire garden point the way to the Holy Grail – the jewelled chalice reportedly used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper?

That is one theory entertained by Richard Kemp, the general manager of Lord Lichfield’s Shugborough estate in Staffs.

Kemp has called in world-renowned code-breakers to try to decipher a cryptic message carved into the Shepherd’s Monument on the Lichfield estate.

The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin’s paintings, and beneath it the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.

[Link]

As Brendan O’Neill puts it

The Grail – because it is mysterious and has always belonged in the realms of the imagination – is a marvellous focus for the new genre of ‘imagined history’, the idea that all history as taught and recorded is a vast cover-up. Once this kind of idea becomes current, particularly with the internet, it acquires a life of its own – regardless of whether it has any basis in reality.

Again we have here a classic and modernist narrative of overlooked clues, microfragments to be decoded by an inspired forensic imagination in pursuit of the truth that is out there but has been covered up by the state, the church, or ignorance, or by superstition. And at the heart – the artifact, mysterious and possessed of aura, veritable witness of history itself.

It is Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code.

I like the association with the internet’s new media – microfragments in a sea of noise and triviality – and all with lives of their own as we track them down in pursuit of ourselves.

All in all – profoundly archaeological.

He talked to our New Media Workshop about recent work of his, and then to the Archaeology Center about his research into what really went on in the expeditions to the Antarctic back in the early 1900s.

Both were provocative.

In Carrying Lyn, Mike and John Rowley carried Lyn Levett through the streets of Cardiff. Lyn, who was Dave, is a quadriplegic actress. As Dave she played King Arthur in Brith Gof’s Arturius Rex. Mike and John were dressed in smart dark suits and ties, Lyn similarly formal in dress and heels. Polaroid photographs were taken and video was made of performers and audience/witnesses (who often became co-performers); South Wales Police obliged with footage from their surveillance cameras.

Polis was another urban piece, an exercise in reconstituting experience. Audience and performers were sent out with instructions to visit, witness events indeterminately staged or spontaneous, gather evidence in the form of video, make reports back at the point of origin, where everything was (re)constituted, or rather where sense was sought in the media fragments. Narratives were framed, connections and coincidences noted, some designed, others happenstance.

Both – theater and performance meeting urban experience in a combination of situationist derive, modernist flanerie and the search for a temporary autonomous zone escaping anomie and state supervision, and all under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera overseeing the street that has literally become Benjamin’s scene of crime.

Provocative – Lyn Levett, being carried, being dropped by Mike with a sickening thud as she hit the ground – someone who is “dead” weight because of their quadriplegia. Who were the performers, who the audience? Just what was going on in such a simple walk across a city on a busy weekend afternoon? And the status of the record – the photographs, reports, video. Above all the question is raised of the status of theater itself. We are used now to notions of performance and performativity being used to understand social and cultural experience – we are all performers. The concepts help us make sense of things. And theater has become intimate with the nation and the state, not least in notions of national theater that confirm our relation to where we belong with its sites (theaters and sets), familiar characters and stories. The comforting world of entertainment. But Mike is working in a different historical space, one that asks theater and performance to retain or recover a disruptive role - an ethics of worlds turned upside down.

So too in Polar Theater. An archaeology of science and heroism. Mike has been uncovering the evidence for the daily lives of those on the early expeditions under the likes of Shackelton, Scott and Amundsen that explored Antarctica. The usual story is one of heroism in the face of the forces of nature. All the expeditions had a scientific purpose, supposedly, behind them. Extreme science, at the edge of things. But here they are in the photos Mike has found in Cambridge and New Zealand performing in drag and black-face, with repurposed scenery and costume, and according to scripts later found dog chewed in the ice.

In some ways this is a simple exercise in archaeology. The camps are now designated heritage sites and so much is left perfectly preserved in the polar ice. But how should the huts be reconstructed? As sites of scientific heroism – neatly ordered spaces with desks, instruments and supplies? Or as theaters? – what took up so much of their time. Mike tracked the instrumentality of the expeditions – the way they worked with animals (pets, tools, food), the repurposing of equipment, the improvisations around science, acting the hero, and acting the fool. And the class and cultural relationships of officers and other ranks, in expeditions of Britain’s Royal Navy to the ends of the earth.

At the meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists a couple of years ago in Thessaloniki Doug Baliey and I ran a session on critical heresy in archaeology. Mike presented a video about Polar Theater. The night before the Berkeley team excavating Çatal Höyük had presented their own video on the life of their project; it included their own amateur dramatics in the evenings after the day’s work of painstaking observation and record. The connection was not lost on the audience. And this, of course, is how real science works. It is not some uncanny communion with the mysteries and forces of nature, of evidence, of archaeological sources. Stories of heroic discovery are glosses on the mundanity of even extreme science. What scientists really get up to in their daily lives is often seen as irrelevant to the science, to the great grand story, or as instrumentality, or it is simply overlooked. But the everyday needs to be (archaeologically) uncovered, because it is where science actually occurs.

Theater archaeology is an ethnography of science. Just as archaeology is the performance of the past.